What we have gained since last Diwali

SCRIP	PURCHASE PRICE	Price as on 11-10-2015	GAIN	%AGE gain
ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK	410	639.80	229.8	56
EVEREADY IND	110	278.00	168	153
CENTURY PLYBOARDS	183	180.50	-2.5	-1
GRANULES	76	148.00	72	95
LLOYD ELECTRIC	180	267.00	87	48
NUCLEUS SOFTWARE	223	234.00	11	5
R S SOFTWARE	283	122.70	-160.3	-57
SUVEN LIFE SCIENCES	122	274.20	152.2	125
T V TODAY NETWORK	170	249.10	79.1	47
CHOLAMANDALAM FINANCE	610	622.00	12	2
ZICOM SECURITY	173	134.40	-38.6	-22
BAJAJ FINSERVE	1450	1950	500	34
overall gain	from last diwali to this diwali			40.35%

Festivals are auspicious and joyful, not necessarily investment days...

The best way to invest this Diwali (or indeed, any Diwali) is to pretend that it's not Diwali. In other words, to have an un-Diwali investment strategy. I realise that this may sound sort of sacrilegious--perhaps it is--but investments are serious business and it's never a good idea to make investing decisions based on custom or habit or ceremony.
Diwali, like all other festivals, is a great time to celebrate, to be with friends and family and to conduct whatever rituals and traditions that are customary for your community. However, unlike many other festivals, Diwali is intertwined with wealth and investments and prosperity which gives it an additional aspect of being an auspicious time to invest.
However, any rational analysis as an investor would perforce lead one to the conclusion that there is no reason to treat a date--any date--as special. Whether the date is a calendar new year like January 1, or a traditional new year like Diwali, or the start of a new decade, it has no more significance to how you invest then your own birthday.
Therefore, just like one does for these other 'round number dates', I'd say that the investment strategy to be followed should depend entirely on what your needs are, and not on what the calendar shows. However, that immediately brings up the question of dealing with what your needs are and how to map them on to the investments you make.
The trick here is to divide your investments into specific financial goals, a goal being defined as the combination of a target amount and a target date. For example, you'll need money for your daughter's higher education after three years. You'd like to buy a house at least ten years before retirement. You'd like to go on a vacation to Europe after two years. You'd like Rs 2 lakh to always be available for emergencies.
Each of these goals is very precise. The risk you can take with it, as well as the amount of money needed can be quantified quite precisely. Therefore, it is relatively easy to decide what kind investments should be made for each of them. Instead each individual must have many portfolios, one for each financial goal. And then can you tune each portfolio's level of conservativeness or aggressiveness to the right level by choosing the right kind of assets

Riding an ailing horse? for how long???

        Investment advisors' commonest lament is that investors are not patient with their investment. Investors buy and sell too often, and have an excessively short-term perspective. However, this is an impression that is primarily true of equity investors. Equity investors tend to sell their holdings for three possible reasons: one: they've made a loss, two: they've made a profit, and three: they've made neither a loss nor a profit.
         However, mutual fund investors seem to be guilty, if anything, of the reverse sin. There are far too many investors who hang on to mediocre funds for long periods of time, losing large chunks of potential returns. Upon compounding over many years, investors lose a majority of their returns too. Does that mean that investors should be trigger-happy about getting out of their investments? Not really. It means that most of us who invest in mutual funds need to distinguish short-term declines or under-performance from long-term poor performance.
          When I look at the assets being managed by equity funds, they naturally mirror the long-term performance of those funds. In general, funds that have done well have had good inflows and are thus managing a large amount of money, and vice versa. The interesting thing is that there are lot of anomalies to this. There are funds that are doing badly but have a lot of money to manage. Mostly, they are funds that have done well for extended periods of time in the past so have a set faithful investors who are hanging in. That makes sense.
          However, there are many funds that have never done well, have always lagged the markets as well as their peers and yet have thousands of crores of assets. The building up of these assets can be attributed to salesmanship, but the blame for its sustenance must go to investors who are not paying attention to their money. A lot of us have investments we are ignoring but which are bleeding potential returns. Investors need to weed out non-performers from their portfolios.